The long-awaited joint federal-state settlement with the major banks for their alleged fraudulent documentation and processing of mortgages and foreclosures was announced on Thursday, February 9. Will it help you, and if so, how?
Using a Chapter 7 case to clean up after closing down your business will be easy or not depending largely on three factors: business assets, taxes, and other nondischargeable debts. These three will usually also determine if you should be in a Chapter 7 case or instead in a Chapter 13 one.
Closing down a business can be messy. A bankruptcy filed to deal with its financial fallout is often more complicated than a normal consumer bankruptcy case. But not necessarily. In one respect at least, a business bankruptcy can actually be much easier than a consumer one.
The multibillion-dollar deal, more than a year in negotiations between the biggest home mortgage servicers on one side and the states’ attorneys general and federal agencies on the other, may be just days from being finished.
The headline story: many more Americans now believe that strong conflict exists between the rich and the poor. The surprising backstory: our attitude has NOT changed about how the rich got that way.
Many more Americans now believe that strong conflicts exist between the rich and the poor. After years of very high unemployment, millions of home foreclosures, and months of the Occupy Movement dominating the news, maybe this is not surprising. But there ARE some unexpected aspects of this change in attitude.
Very few people who want to file Chapter 7 bankruptcy need to take the means test all the way to its limit. But if you do, you better have some iron-clad “special circumstances” to defeat your “presumption of abuse.”
The means test is supposed to be an objective way to decide who qualifies to file a Chapter 7 bankruptcy. So what’s so objective about whether your “monthly disposable income” is less than $117 or more than $195? Sounds pretty arbitrary to me.
What happens if you make too much money so that your are over “median income,” but still want to file a Chapter 7 case? You get to go through the “black box” that is the expenses side of the means test.
Waiting just one day to file your Chapter 7 bankruptcy case can make qualifying for it much easier–or much harder!